Back in January, I wrote a blog post headlined A modest proposal for big green NGOs that suggested, in what was intended to be a helpful way, that the Environmental Defense Fund, the World Wildlife Fund and The Nature Conservancy urge their corporate allies to speak up in support of the EPA’s proposed rules to regulate coal plants, a cornerstone of the Obama administration climate policy.

They all assured me that they are doing the very best they can to persuade big companies to do so.

Guess how many of the 50 told me that they are working alongside their environmental partners to support the plan? Three–Google, Mars and Starbucks.

Most are staying out of the fight but as Anne Kelly of Ceres, which is lobbying for the plan, told me, their “silence isn’t neutrality.” Instead, their silence allows the US Chamber of Commerce and other conservative trade associations to speak for the business community on climate and energy issues. And, as you probably know, the chamber is no fan of climate regulation.

Here’s how my story begins:

Many environmental groups consider the Obama administration’s plan to regulate carbon-spewing coal plants, which aims to cut carbon pollution by 30%, as one of our last chances to win the fight against climate change.

But the vast majority of their top corporate partners – companies like Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, FedEx, UPS, Target and Walmart, which have worked with environmental NGOs for years – aren’t backing them up, according to a Guardian survey.

The survey consisted of calls and emails to nearly 50 corporations that work with three environmental groups – Environmental Defense Fund, The Nature Conservancy and the World Wildlife Fund US – that have identified the Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Power Plan as a top priority. These are Fortune 500 global companies that tout their sustainability efforts and celebrate their environmental partnerships.

The reluctance of companies to take a stand raises questions about the depth of partnerships between companies and NGOs. By remaining quiet, these companies make it harder for the EPA to roll out the plan in the face of vehement opposition from fossil fuel companies and Republicans. “Silence isn’t neutral,” says Anne Kelly of Ceres, who is organizing companies to support the EPA.

The lack of public support could jeopardize the clean power plan, and – if the US isn’t able to make a strong climate commitment as a result – could ultimately undermine the success of the global climate talks in Paris this year.

The companies that won’t get involved say it’s because the regulation of power plant emissions is not core to their business. Environmentalists maintain that climate change is everybody’s business.

I’m sorry to say that all of this points to the shallowness of much corporate rhetoric about “sustainability.” It also tells me that, more than ever, we need a political movement to demand government action to stop climate pollution. Companies need to know that if they don’t take a stand on behalf of the climate, they’re going to hear about it from activist groups (where are you, Greenpeace, now that we need you?) and they’re going to risk losing the support of their employees and customers.

Put simply, without a whole lot more people pushing them in the right direction, GE, Goldman Sachs, IBM and Walmart aren’t going to get us where we need to go. Not even close.

If I sound frustrated, it’s because I’m feeling that way. I must add that none of this is personal. I like and respect the people I know at EDF, WWF and The Nature Conservancy. They’re smart, dedicated and hard-working. But they’re mostly playing the same insiders game that failed to get climate legislation through Congress back in 2009.

I also admire the sustainability executives at many of the companies that are sitting on the sidelines of the climate fight. They’re great internal advocates for the cause, and they’re not to blame for this widespread corporate indifference. It’s their CEOs who need a wake-up call.

In the end, the issue of global warming is really not all that complicated: It’s time to stop using the atmosphere as a waste dump for carbon pollution. That’s just wrong, and that’s why the EPA rules should be everybody’s business.

Here’s an idea for big environmental NGOs that work with corporate partners: Kindly recommend to those partners that they raise their voices in Washington in support of the EPA’s proposed coal plant rules.

The coal plant rules are the cornerstone of the Obama administration’s climate change policy. Yet they are being strongly opposed by mainstream Washington business lobbies like the US Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM).

The big corporate partners of the green groups could make a difference. They could support the rules on their own–few have done so–and, just as important, speak up inside the halls of the chamber and NAM, asking them to halt their opposition to the rules.

No climate issue matters more, Mindy Lubber of Ceres told me, for a story posted the other day at Guardian Sustainable Business, which we’ll get to in a moment.

The Environmental Defense Fund, for its part, works with AT&T, Caterpillar, DuPont, KKR, McDonald’s, Ocean Spray, Starbucks and Walmart, among others.

I could go on but you get the point. Now contrast those lists with the challenges faced by Mindy Lubber and Ceres, as they try to line up companies to back the EPA rules. That’s why my story is about, and here is how it begins:

As the US political fight over climate change moves from Washington DC to 50 state capitals, companies that are serious about sustainability need to support theEPA’s proposed rules to curb carbon pollution from existing power plants.

So, at least, says Mindy Lubber, the president of Ceres, a nonprofit that brings together companies, investors and public-interest groups to advocate for sustainability.

“Companies have the strength and power – the footprint to make a huge difference,” Lubber told me at a lunch earlier this month. Ceres celebrates its 25th anniversary Tuesday.

It’s hard to overstate the importance of the proposed power plant rules, which are the cornerstone of President Barack Obama’s climate agenda. Power plants account for nearly 40% of all US greenhouse gas emissions.

What Ceres has found, Mindy told me, is that it’s hard to get big companies to support the EPA and the president, and overcome their habitual, instinctive resistance to government regulation.

Last month, as I wrote in the Guardian, Ceres released a statement supporting the rules that was signed by more than 200 companies but most were small or midsized. Big firms to sign on included Ikea, Kellogg, Levi Strauss, Mars, Nestle, Nike, Novelis, VF and Unilever. They are to be commended.

Ceres’s list would carry a lot more weight if other NGOS like WWF, The Nature Conservancy and Environmental Defense persuaded most or all their corporate partners to sign on.

Until they do, conservative trade associations like the US Chamber, NAM, the National Mining Association and the American Farm Bureau Federation, which have joined together to oppose the EPA rules, will speak for business in Washington. I’ve never understood why so many companies that profess to care about the environment — and, in my view, actually do care about the environment — have allowed that to happen.

For the most part, corporate sustainability programs drive change from the top down. If Apple wants to improve safety at the factories where its products are made, or Walmart wants to reduce fertilizer runoff in agriculture, or McDonald’s pledges to buy beef raised in environmentally friendly ways, those companies set targets and goals, they deploy a mix of carrots and sticks to bring their suppliers along, those suppliers push further down the chain and, if all goes well, workers, farmers and maybe the planet are all a little better off.

Whatever one thinks of this theory of change–my view is that it works quite well–it does little for the billions of people who are untouched by global supply chains. In my latest story for Guardian Sustainable Business, I write about a project called Fish Forever that is designed to help fishermen and women who work beyond the reach of global supply chains.

I heard about Fish Forever from Brett Jenks, the chief executive of a conservation group called Rare, which is based in Arlington, VA.

Fish Forever is launching this year in five countries – Belize, Brazil, Indonesia, Mozambique and the Philippines. It targets fishers with a single boat or two, as well as those who fish from shore. In developing countries, these mostly poor, small-scale fishers account for half of all fish caught, the vast majority of which is consumed domestically….

Each Fish Forever partner brings expertise to the partnership. Environmental Defense has been a pioneer in rebuilding fisheries through what is often called rights-based management. Rare specializes in mobilizing communities in poor countries on behalf of conservation. And the scientists at UCSB are experts in monitoring and measuring the health of fisheries.

Here’s how the program works: with the backing of state or national governments, local fishers get exclusive fishing rights to a community fishing areas – a bay or stretch of coast. The community then has good reason to adopt conservation practices because it will reap the benefits if they work.

Typically, those practices include the establishment of a marine preserve, also known as no-take zone, located inside the community fishing area, or nearby. These no-take zones give fish in the area the opportunity to recover and regenerate themselves. Local fishers enforce the no-take zones themselves.

The idea is to create incentives for the community to think long-term about the value of their natural asset, and take steps to protect it.A sense of ownership leads to stewardship. As a wise man once said, no one washes a rental car.

Rare isn’t a high-profile NGO but it has attracted support from some big names. Michael Bloomberg, Hank and Wendy Paulson and Jeremy Grantham are all donors. Which leads me to conclude that Brett Jenks and his group must be doing something right.

Last month, I wrote three blogposts adding up to more than 2,000 words about Walmart’s supplier sustainability index. I did so because I think it’s a big deal, but skeptics remain. Some people simply can’t accept the fact that Walmart can do anything that’s good for its people or the planet.

In a guest post, Alisha Staggs of the Environmental Defense Fund reacts to my blogposts and argues that the Walmart index will, in fact, have a meaningful impact. Alisha works for EDF in Bentonville, Arkansas, where Walmart is based. She works on the supplier index and with The Sustainability Consortium, a broader coalition of retailers, brands and NGOs that is developing ways to identify and measure the most important environmental and social impacts of consumer products. Alisha is trained as a biologist and has an MBA from the University of Arkansas.

Here’s what Alisha has to say, and I’ll offer a concluding comment or two below.

With a 25-year track record challenging companies to make decisions that are good for the environment and the economy, we at EDF are used to asking these types of tough questions.

That’s precisely why we have an EDF office based in Bentonville dedicated solely to working together with Walmart to advance sustainability. Because we don’t take money from the company, we can push hard to achieve the kinds of transformational change of which it is capable.

Germany, once the world’s leading market for solar power, is pulling back its subsidies.

Q Cells, once the world’s largest solar company, just went bankrupt.

This isn’t happy news. If the country that birthed the Green Party cannot sustain its support for solar, what does that tell the rest of us?

It should tell us that it’s time (actually way past time) to get serious about energy and climate policy.

This week, as I followed the news from Germany, I talked with a couple of energy-policy experts who I respect–Jesse Jenkins of the Breakthrough Institute and Gernot Wagner of the Environmental Defense Fund. I also watched an interview (below) with Bill Gates from the Wall Street Journal’s Eco-nomics conference. They disagree about some specifics, but they all agree that the US needs to get a lot smarter about how to drive a transition to low-carbon energy. So let’s try to see what we can learn from Germany, and the rest of Europe.

Perhaps the most obvious takeaway is that we should not place expensive bets on any one solution. That’s what the Germans did, with generous subsidies in the form of a feed-in tariff for solar. Even though the costs of solar have dropped dramatically, the subsidies were not sustainable. Remember when people said nuclear was too cheap to meter. Solar PV is too costly to subsidize on a scale that matters. [click to continue…]

About 64 million people visit McDonald’s every day. That’s a stunning number. They’ll see changes in the year ahead, some driven by a renewed sustainability push at the $24-billion fast-food giant.

LED lights in new and renovated stores. “Greener” packaging. Eco-labels on fish sold in Europe.

None of this is earth-shattering or, more importantly, earth-saving, but it’s the start of something big, says Bob Langert, McDonald’s v.p. for sustainability.

“We’re on a path to mainstream sustainability,” Bob told me by phone the other day. “This is transformational for us. We want to be bolder, and we want to make a bigger impact.” Most important, he said, the company wants to embed sustainability into its operations and, eventually, into its brand.

In a way, McDonald’s is like Walmart–it’s never going to be beloved in the Whole Foods-shopping, arugula-eating, tony precincts of Berkeley, Brooklyn or Bethesda. But the company is much too big to ignore or wish away.

Today, McDonald’s released its 2011 Sustainability Scorecard. Under the umbrella of sustainability, the company includes environmental responsibility, its supply chain, nutrition and well-being, employees and community grants and programs, albeit in a way that highlights accomplishments and isn’t easily transparent. (Please let me know if you can find an accounting of the company’s carbon footprint or a greenhouse gas reduction goal, because I couldn’t.) But McDonald’s can feel good about a couple of big initiatives in the year just past. [click to continue…]

Next April, FORTUNE will again bring together some of the smartest people we know in sustainability for Brainstorm Green, the magazine’s annual conference on business and the environment.

This is will be our 5th Brainstorm Green–hard for me to believe, since I’ve been involved since the beginning–and we’ve again got a first-rate lineup of leaders from corporate America, the environmental movement, the investment community and government, as well as a scattering of interesting writers, thinkers and doers about “green.”

Once again, the event will be held at the spectacular Ritz Carlton in Laguna Niguel, CA. Dates are April 16-18, 2012.

Alan Mulally

New faces for 2012 from the corporate world will include Alan Mulally, the president and CEO of Ford; Rob Walton, the chairman of Walmart; Andy Taylor, the chairman and CEO of Enteprise (they buy more cars than anyone in America); C. Larry Pope, the chairman and CEO of Smithfield Foods (they make more hot dogs than anyone in America, as I wrote in Smithfield Foods: Sustainable Pork?); Vance Bell, the chairman and CEO of Shaw Industries (the world’s largest carpet manufacturer, see my blogpost, This carpet has moral fiber); John Faraci, the chairman and CEO of International Paper; Gary Hirshberg, the CE-Yo of Stonyfield Farm; Russ Ford, the executive vice president of Shell; Bea Perez, the chief sustainability officer of Coca-Cola; and Trae Vassallo of Kleiner Perkins. [click to continue…]

That’s the premise behind a partnership between the Environmental Defense Fund and InnoCentive. You probably know EDF–they’re a (mostly) business friendly nonprofit that looks for solutions to environmental problems. InnoCentive is a company that has built an open Internet platform to connect other firms, governments and NGOs to creative people all over the world who can help them solve problems.

Last week, EDF and Innocentive declared a winner in their first challenge, which looked for a new approach to the old problem of agricultural nitrate pollution: He is Patrick Fuller, 23, who is studying for a PhD. in chemical and biological engineering at Northwestern. He’ll be awarded $5,000 for his idea, about which more below.

Beth Trask

To learn more about the partnership, I spoke with Beth Trask, who leads, along with David Witzel, leads what EDF calls its innovation exchange, an effort to spread new “green” solutions among companies.

“Like many people,” Beth told me, “we’ve been looking with much interest at the open innovation space. Basically, the concept is that there are many more ideas and possible solutions out there in the world than any given company or organization can tap into on its own.”

Arguably, Walmart has done more than any environmental group, politician, government regulator or Silicon Valley clean tech firm to nudge the U.S. economy towards sustainability in the last five years. Walmart’s 2011 Global Responsibility Report, published last week, makes clear that despite the recession and some revently rough going for the company–lately its stock has lagged the S&P500 —Walmart is pushing ahead towards its big goals: To generate no waste, to be 100%-powered by renewable energy, and to sell lots more products that sustain people and the environment.

Yet a closer look at the report demonstrates that there are limits to what any company, even one as vast as Walmart, can do. Most of its environmental gains have come from doing what Walmart has always done very well–driving efficiency in its stores and supply chain. When sustainable initiatives cost more money, as they sometimes do, progress has been halting.

Still, Walmart deserves at least two cheers, maybe two-and-half for its efforts, particularly in the current, dispiriting political climate.

As Elizabeth Sturcken of the Environmental Defense Fund, which works closely with Walmar, told me:

Leadership on environmental issues is coming from Bentonville these days, not from Washington. Some people in Washington want to roll back basic environmental protection on clean air and clean water, saying it’s bad for business. Our work with Walmart proves that’s not true….Generally, all the signs that I see are full speed ahead.

Andrea Thomas, who has led Walmart’s sustainability work for the past six months, made a similar point. The company set big, bold, broad goals back in 2005, without knowing how it would meet them. Since then, it has discovered unexpected business benefits.

Rather than being paralyzed by (the goals), they ignited a lot of energy behind doing experiments, trying different things. Today, there’s a lot of interesting work going on, not just in the U.S., but all over the world. I’m very encouraged by the progress we’re making.

Here’s one success story from the report, a promising new initiative and an arena in which Walmart’s progress appears to have stalled:

Walmart recycling with "super sandwich bale"

Waste: WMT has turned its garbage into an asset, just by thinking about the stuff it throws away in a more disciplined fashion. Across California, more than 80% of waste has been diverted from landfills and made into something else, turning what was a cost center into a source of new revenue.

Said Thomas: “We would pay for people to haul our trash away. And we paid to put it in a landfill. Now people are paying us.”

Success hasn’t come as easily as it sounds, of course. To help find an outlet for food waste, Walmart’s foundation donated 100 refrigerated trucks to food banks. “ Now they have a means to pick up and deliver some of the food that we can’t use in the stores, but that’s still good food,” Thomas said.

Supporting small, local farms: Last fall, WMT announced an array of targets related to agriculture. In the U.S., the company promised to double sales of locally-sourced produce, so that it accounts for 9 percent of all produce sold by the end of 2015. Globally, WMT said it will sell $1 billion in food sourced from 1 million small- and medium-sized farmers in emerging markets by the end of 2015.

To achieve those goals, Thomas told me, WMT has to simplify its supply chain to deal directly with farmers and eliminate some middlemen. “The logistics aren’t as difficult as you might think,” she said. “The farmer can actually drop off produce at the distribution center or at the store.”

If all goes according to plan, WMT should be able to sell fresher, local food at lower prices, and eliminate some of the greenhouse gases generated by a global supply chain for food. Like the waste initiative, the agriculture initiatives mostly dovetail nicely with the culture of efficiency at Walmart.

Clean energy: To achieve its goal of being powered by 100% renewable energy, WMT has made its fleet, stores and distribution centers more efficient. But its commitment to wind and solar power has been limited because they cost more than electricity from fossil fuels. The report says:

During FY11, we successfully completed several renewable energy projects, including the installation of 35 solar projects in Arizona, California and Puerto Rico. Eight of the solar projects installed in FY11 utilized thin-film solar, which created manufacturing jobs and accelerated this new technology’s entry to market. We installed seven fuel cell projects in California this year and completed two microturbine wind projects on the parking lot light poles at the Walmart in Worcester, Mass., and at the Sam’s Club in Palmdale, Calif.

This is all to the good. By buying renewable energy in selected markets, WMT will help bring costs down. But because wind and solar power generally cost more than electricity from coal, nuclear or natural gas in most places, WMT can’t or won’t buy clean energy on a scale that matters. (If the company says in its report how much of its energy now comes from renewable sources, I couldn’t find it. I’d guess it’s well under 10% of WMT’s total energy spend, but I’m ready to be corrected.) Buying renewable energy would drive up its costs, with no tangible benefits to customers, and put the company at a competitive disadvantage, as the company says in the report:

In our efforts to ensure our operations are contributing to everyday low prices for our customers, it has sometimes been difficult to find and develop low-carbon technologies that meet our ROI requirements.

This, then, is where we run up against the limits of efficiency and, more broadly, what any company can reasonably be expected to do to become more sustainable.

More broadly, it’s a reminder that the rhetoric of green business — how green is gold, how green is green, how clean energy will generate jobs and growth — hasn’t always served the cause well. Sometimes, indeed often, “green” is more expensive than “brown,” or to be more precise, the full costs of “brown” (air and water pollution, GHG emissions) aren’t captured in its price. This is why policy matters. This is why we need to price carbon emissions into the energy economy.

Put another way, so long as environmental leadership is coming from Bentonville and not Washington, we’re in trouble.

What a different just a few years can make. Hard as it is to believe, there was a time not long ago when Congress appeared to be on the verge of a bipartisan agreement to regulate global warming pollution.

Republicans John McCain, John Warner, Newt Gingrich and Tim Pawlenty all supported efforts to put a cap on greenhouse gas emissions. Gingrich and Pawlenty went so far as to appear in commercials with the Environmental Defense Fund supporting climate regulation. And now? “It was a mistake, it was stupid, it was wrong,” Pawlenty says.

The radical shift in the political climate means that big NGOs like the Environmental Defense Fund, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Sierra Club now must fight merely to preserve the status quo in Congress.

Environmental groups are playing defense rather than offense in Washington, said Fred Krupp, the president of the Environmental Defense Fund, during a panel today on climate policy that opened FORTUNE’s Brainstorm Green conference.

He noted that House Republicans have voted to block funding not just for EPA’s efforts regulate carbon pollution (efforts that are required by a Supreme Court decision) but also for EPA efforts to control, on public health ground, mercury pollution from cement factories.

On climate issues, Fred said: “It’s hard to have a meaningful exchange of viewers, a serious conversation in Washington.”

That’s a big, big problem because, as he noted, every major piece of environmental legislation in the U.S has been enacted with bipartisan support. Fred himself was a leading advocate for the late 1980s cap-and-trade system–to regulate sulfur dioxide pollution–that was put into place by President George Bush and his EPA chief, Bill Reilly. [click to continue…]